WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A year and a half before the September 11, 2001, attacks, a British Muslim told the FBI that he was trained to be a hijacker for Osama bin Laden and was in the United States to carry out attacks, NBC News and The Wall Street Journal have reported.

Niaz Khan, a British citizen of Pakistani descent, said in interviews that instead of meeting his contacts in New York, he went to Atlantic City, New Jersey, gambled away his money, then turned himself in and confessed.

Khan told NBC and The Wall Street Journal that he was lured into joining a group of Islamic radicals in Britain who offered to pay his gambling debts and was trained to hijack planes at a camp in Pakistan.

A congressional report on the September 11 attacks confirmed that in April 2000 an unnamed "walk-in" source told FBI agents in Newark, New Jersey, that he "was to meet five or six persons," some of them pilots, who would take over a plane and fly to Afghanistan, or blow up the plane, NBC said.

During the Wall Street Journal interview, Khan produced business cards from two FBI counterterrorism agents with whom he said he spent about two weeks in 2000, the newspaper reported.

Citing records and law-enforcement officials, the report also said Khan passed two FBI polygraph tests of his story.

NBC quoted a former FBI official as saying that the Newark agents believed Khan but were ordered by headquarters to "return him to London and forget about it." But the FBI insists it investigated Khan`s allegations thoroughly, could not confirm them, and had no grounds to hold him, NBC said.

An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment on the reports.

There is no evidence Khan was part of the September 11 plot, but he was urged to go public partly at the urging of lawyers for September 11 victims` families, according to the reports.

Hindsight can be a wonderful thing.

I'm not really interested in arguing whether or not the FBI investigated this properly; there are enough Conservative Vs Liberal slanging matches on this board to begin with. But what does worry me is, how many (if any) incidents like this have taken place before or even after 9/11?